[Editor’s note: Fulcrum7 does not endorse movies; the theme and title of this article are used by the author to illustrate a point.]
A Historical Context
Turns out it “takes a village” in a way Hillary Clinton never imagined. Of all the Seventh-day Adventist Churches in North America, the Berrien Springs Village Seventh-day Adventist Church is taking a very public stand for religious freedom.
For two years in a row, on Religious Liberty Sabbath, the Village Church has been ‘punching’ above its weight by going head-to-head with the General Conference and the North American Division over their failure to protect member’s rights against the COVID mandates.
The Village’s latest punch up took place Friday evening, January 14, and Sabbath, January 15, 2022. The ‘Empire’ struck back with an Adventist Review “informational release” on January 26, 2022. The good news is that the ‘punch’ created a somewhat more freedom-friendly “clarification” by the Empire. The bad news is that the Empire doesn’t take criticism well.
The problem began when the Empire issued an October 25, 2021 “reaffirmation” of its stance on the COVID mandates by telling the world that while it respected “each individual’s freedom of choice…. claims of religious liberty are not used appropriately in objecting to government mandates or employer programs designed to protect the health and safety of their communities.” The Empire expressed its empathy for members losing their jobs this way:
“We understand that some of our members view things differently, and we respect those convictions. They may at times have rights that can be pursued under the law, and we will point them towards materials and resources for doing so but cannot directly undertake this personal effort for them.”
So much for standing up for the religious liberty of members. The Empire will point you in the direction of the library.[1]
Back at the Village, Dr. Conrad Vine responded in the second service sermon on January 15, 2022. He questioned both the logic and legitimacy of the “reaffirmation.”
Apparently annoyed by Vine’s sermon, the Empire issued the previously mentioned “informational release.” The response to Dr. Vine brought a slightly better tone for individual freedom.
The Empire restated that it disagreed with members who “are willing to lose their job, if necessary, rather than take the vaccine.” And it would “support them in the following ways: 1) By praying with them that God will work out a solution to the challenge they face; 2) Assisting them in writing a personal letter to their employer.” The Empire shifted from pointing members to the library, to prayer and literary assistance.
As to Dr. Vine’s sermon, the Empire angrily accused him of potentially “undermin[ing] Church authority, creat[ing] confusion, and lead[ing] to fragmentation.” It also claimed that he was responsible for Adventists who are “considering leaving the Adventist Church.” Wow. The Empire apparently gave no thought to how its failure to support the religious freedom of church members to bodily and medical autonomy was impacting member loyalty. The Empire also rejected as “absolutely” untrue Vine’s suggestion that perhaps all the government money pouring into its healthcare system might have influenced its muted religious liberty response.
All Adventists owe a debt of gratitude to the Village and Dr. Vine for raising the religious liberty alarm that caused the Empire to strike back. The Church is simply without excuse for not separating its view on vaccines and public health from the serious religious liberty issues involved in the mandate. What possible reason could the Church have to turn away from its members who are losing their jobs over their sincere religious beliefs? The two issues are obviously separate. It is as clear as distinguishing between a firm belief that God should be worshipped on Saturday and suggesting the government enforce Saturday church attendance. Coercion is the enemy of liberty.
Whatever the merits of Dr. Vine’s suggestions as to the reasons the Church has lost its spine to fight the current coercion, the Empire’s decline in defending religious liberty is a historically ongoing matter. Not that the Church admits it. Instead, its statement reaffirmed its “long history of defending freedom of conscience … regarding the observance [of] Sabbath.” The United States has never mandated Sunday worship, so the “long history” refers primarily to defending members against private employers rather than government coercion.
`Unmentioned were the several “long history” battles the Church has engaged in against government authorized coercion. It is those battles that form the evidentiary basis for my charge that the Church is on the decline in standing up against coercion.
The Civil War
Beginning with the Civil War, the Church faced the problem of its members being conscripted into military service. While the Church took a position against members bearing arms, as with the vaccine mandates, it left the decision to the conscience of the member. Far from pointing members to the library, the Church in 1918 created a War Service Commission, headed by Carlyle B. Haynes, to publicly stand with members against being forced into combat. The War Service Commission, and related efforts by the Church to defend its members against coercion, had a huge impact on the government. In addition, the Church trained its young men to become medics, thus looking to create an established path for religious exemption.
If COVID mandates are divisive, imagine the issue for young Adventists who were likely accused of being cowards and traitors for being pacifists. Yet the Church held strong for individual liberty by mounting a comprehensive effort to protect the religious liberty of its younger members.
Compulsory Labor Unions
The next battle the Church faced was compulsory unionism. Just like the COVID mandates, employees were threatened with discharge over their religious beliefs. This coercion was either specifically authorized by the federal government, or the government directly imposed the coercion. Using its successful War Service Commission template, the Church created a Council on Industrial Relations and appointed Carlyle B. Haynes its Executive Secretary. The purpose for this council was to work to save the jobs of Church members. One solution pressed by the Church was that instead of joining or financially supporting the union, members would be willing to support “the hospital, benevolent, and charitable projects and programs of mercy, welfare and relief engaged in by labor unions.” Specifically, Church members should be “strictly neutral” during industrial strife, should pay union fees to charitable or benevolent union projects, and accept the employer wages and benefits agreed to in the union contract.
Notice the similarity between the solutions to compulsory combat and compulsory unionism – the Church would help members obtain an accommodation - an alternative charitable service. To the careful observer, unfortunately, the rot had started to set in. The most direct way to defend the religious liberty of all employees in the United States was to promote “Right to Work” laws. These guaranteed the right of all employees to be free from union coercion in the workplace. Employees could not be fired for refusing to support a labor union.
The Church fought side by side with the National Right to Work Committee. The Committee was a single-purpose organization dedicated to the passage of Right to Work laws. Organized labor, the force behind compulsion, viewed the work of the Church with particular alarm. The most compelling argument against union compulsion was that employees should not be forced to choose between their jobs and their religious beliefs. Unions wanted to get the Church to stop its opposition to compulsion.
Dr. Vine’s sermon contained the haunting suggestion that the Church’s healthcare institutions were largely responsible for weakening the Church’s spine against the coercion of the COVID mandate. Consider the following parallel in the fight against union coercion. In 1974, Congress expanded the coverage of the National Labor Relations Act to allow labor unions to organize health care institutions. With this change, the problem of compulsory unionism took on a special urgency for the Church which employs many members in its vast health care network.
The Church’s solution to this growing problem was to compromise on coercion. It entered into an agreement with organized labor to stop fighting for Right to Work laws in exchange for AFL-CIO backing for an amendment to the National Labor Relations Act which would, among other things, allow Seventh-day Adventists to pay their compulsory union dues to a non-religious, non-union charity. The result was 29 U.S.C. Section 169, known as “Section 19.”
Section 19 has a couple of anti-freedom features. One of them is that essentially only Adventists are protected.
The second is that if an Adventist who pays the dues amount to a charity needs to file a grievance under the union contract, the Adventist must personally pay the cost of the grievance to the union. In union contracts, the union is always the “exclusive bargaining representative.” The result is that Adventist employees suffering from mistaken or unjust discipline in the workplace have no option other than to use the union grievance procedure. They must pay to a charity the dues amount and also write a blank check to the union for whatever costs it incurs in the grievance. Of course, supporting the union violates the Adventist employee’s religious beliefs. The practical result of Section 19 is that Adventists cannot do anything to protect themselves against unjust discipline and remain faithful to their religious beliefs.
While it should strike anyone as odd that the Church would agree to leave its members so exposed to injustice in the workplace, that is not the major problem with Section 19. Historically, the religious liberty officials of the Church have been virulent church-state separationists. Anything that even hinted of a state benefit to religion, or worse, the Catholic Church, came in for stern denunciation and opposition. Imagine then the “inconsistency” (to be polite) of getting a federal statute passed that protected only the religious beliefs of Adventists. Section 19 did not include the words “Seventh-day Adventist,” but it so closely describes the Adventist Church as to protect only Adventists, and various strains of the Amish and Mennonite denominations. Baptists, Catholics, and most Christians, in contrast, can “pound sand.”
Section 19 is an extraordinary example of a federal statute intended to extend a special benefit not simply to religion, but to one denomination – the Seventh-day Adventist Church. Not content with passing Section 19, religious liberty officials in various areas of the Church passed “little Section 19” statutes in eleven states.
All the main religious liberty officials involved in the passage of Section 19 have passed on and are no longer around to defend their decisions.
The Church was also active in the federal courts to protect its members against compulsory unionism. Prior to the passage of Section 19, Lee Boothby was hired by the Church to litigate on behalf of Adventists whose employment was at issue because they refused to support the union. Boothby, who also recently passed away, was a successful lawyer. Boothby’s work, along with the work of non-Adventist David Watkins on behalf of the Church, created a series of victories under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (42 U.S.C. Section 2000e et seq.). These cases established the right of Adventists to keep their jobs and redirect their union fees to a charity. Nothing in those cases required Adventists to pay for union grievance filing.
As this history shows, the Church went from a vigorous, uncompromised fight against coercion in military service, to a tremendously compromised fight against union coercion in the workplace after its healthcare institutions became involved.
Some may rightly point out that in the fight against the military and union coercion, the Church had a teaching supporting the views of those members being coerced. In the COVID situation, the Church says that it does not have a view supporting the members being coerced. Just the opposite. The answer is that in both, the matter of compulsory combat and compulsory unionism, the Church said that it supported members even if they disagreed with the teachings of the Church. Thus it had to be the coercion that was at the heart of the Church’s defense of member rights.
Dr. Vine may be correct on all the possible reasons he gives for the Church’s failure to stand strong against the coercive COVID mandates. But the rot in the Church’s defense of religious freedom has been going on for many decades.
[Editor’s note: This article by Professor Cameron shows how the GC’s PARL Department has gone from being a staunch advocate for freedom of conscience and religious liberty to offering tepid support at best in recent decades. This decline in PARL’s vigor reached its tragic nadir in the October 2021 Reaffirmation Statement which affirmed PARL’s support for forced vaccination over and above the conscience of individual members.]
Conclusion
What do I think? The parallels of compromise and the involvement of our healthcare system may or may not be a coincidence. It is likely that the leaders of the Church for the first one-hundred years were made of sturdier stuff.
I fear the main problem is that the politics of the left has invaded the Church. When I was young, both left and right considered religion to be positive and essential to democracy. Today, much of the left is openly hostile to Christianity largely because the Bible stands as an obstacle to its social agenda. Many of today’s Church leaders want to be viewed as part of the “cool kids” aligned with the political left. Vaccine is cool. Unvaxxed is not. Freedom gets shoved to the curb.
In contrast, consider those Adventist Church leaders who braved the political storm during the great world wars to defend pacifism. That was not cool, and our leaders did not appear to care. Perhaps that fact, more than Dr. Vine’s presentation, explains the harsh tone with which the Empire struck back to justify its current failure to defend religious freedom.
Bruce N. Cameron is the Reed Larson Professor of Labor Law at Regent University School of Law, and he is on the litigation staff of the National Right to Work Legal Defense and Education Foundation. This article does not reflect the views of either the University or the Foundation.
[1] In an October 19, 2021, video conversation between NAD PARL Director Orlan Johnson, Liberty Editor Bettina Krause, and GC Associate General Counsel Todd McFarland, Johnson gave a much more pro-freedom response. He said that the Church defended the religious freedom of non-members, so it would certainly also help members who had religious objections to the COVID mandate.